Something To Tell You

By David Edwards

Something To Tell You is unique and rare, like the God particle created by Bert and Sam when colliding matter and antimatter deep beneath Geneva at CERN.
The story follows the two families of Bert Leinster and his best friend Sam Murray, as the earth comes under bombardment by a Higgs Boson particle storm.The Central Control of the World council insists that survival depends on living underground, protected by The Envelope. As CCOW persuades humankind to hide in the Deeps, Bert cannot challenge CCOW nor comprehend why people cannot see the truth behind the lies.
Everything changes when he hears Her. Lily, a plant who becomes his enemy in the battle to save humankind, to save you... although 99.9% of you is empty space. Do you deserve saving? Is humankind superior to Nature? For every positive there is a negative: light and dark, good and evil, God and the devil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Edwards
• Release date: Apr 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789018875

David Edwards

David Edwards is is co-editor and co-founder of Media Lens. He is the author of Free To Be Human (1995), The Compassionate Revolution (1998), and co-author, with David Cromwell, of Guardians of Power (2006), Newspeak in the 21st Century (2009), and Propaganda Blitz: How and Why Corporate Media Distort Reality (Pluto, 2018).

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Contents

[1] In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth

[2] Denial of Reality

[3] Lies and more Lies

[4] Pain and Guilt

[5] Anger and the Bargain

[6] Lonely Reflection

[7] The Upward Turn

[8] Working Through

[9] Acceptance and Hope

[10] Now the Earth was Formless and Empty

Author’s Note [Cern]

[1]

In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth

It was Lily who first noticed the brewing storm in the universal ether of which earth is a minuscule participant. She had been the first to exist and She hoped She would be the last to die. Existence as ordained by God and the Devil in the instance of the Big Bang. When Good and Evil were created as opposites and when plus balanced minus. She, a prime mover of the 4% of matter that exists and of the 96% dark energy and dark matter that does not.

This disturbance was an invisible strangulation upon Man, who felt nothing. She surveyed him on the tiny earth; a void in empty space, who artificially filled himself with feelings and emotions. The cleverest species of his world, or so he thought. She saw that Man was 100% certain that it owned and controlled its destiny; the poor fools, Lily knew the true answer, pure vanity was an ill-conceived confidence.

* * *

Pink Bermudas and a yellow polo shirt clung to Sam Murray as he scanned the computer print-out in front of him. He smacked his head onto the pile, creating a speckled shroud that stared back at him, mocking his efforts. Still as the silence, he listened for guidance, a gift from his God, but the control room denied him. For the first time in five days the drone of the aircon had petered out and his discordant team had escaped to the fresh Swiss air. The dark art of colliding particle matter had been left with the boss, whose blackened feet were flung onto his desk. Bemused by the test results, he watched his blue flip-flops dangle off the end of his toes. Sam pivoted his heels left then right, a human metronome to calm his fear.

Crashing forward he slammed his laptop closed and rolled his chair away from the table at speed. Sam addressed the roof through his grimace, ‘Hell, there has got to be a logical reason;’ he stood and wobbled, there was no reply. Slapping his dead thighs the words boomed around the dingy Portakabin, mocking his efforts. It hung dusty and grey in the cave set on a heavy framework of girders. A low tech demoralising shell, a husk containing the kernel, the Large Hadron Collider; the highest of high tech instruments known to man. The dreariness was marginally improved by the lighting, his top half was sodium bright and his bottom half a dull orange. Looking out, he saw the giant lights cabled to the invisible roof like the sun hung above the earth. ‘Logic, only logic counts, nothing can be so impossible.’ He stretched to press his palms against the scant window, staring at his small world through the greasy smears. Turning away with a sigh, he slid back into his chair and rubbed his eyes with a damp shirt collar; searching for inspiration but there was none to be gathered from the place itself.

Sam’s hand hovered over the phone. How to break the news to his boss? What would his best friend ask him, because Bert Leinster knew everything; the God of particle physics and the discoverer of the Higgs Boson particle in 2012. Sam’s chest was tight and his breathing shallow, he finally picked up his mobile. Bert would know what to do. He remembered their time since Manchester University. They were still a perfect working couple, despite their very different marriages and disparate lifestyles.

Sam had left home in Blonay at six precisely. The continuum of time was important in his theoretical world. An exact reality based on a future event or a very instant past, namely his alarm clock. It took nearly two hours by rail to reach CERN in Geneva, The European Organisation for Nuclear Research and the Large Hadron Collider or LHCb. The entrance was sited above the twenty seven kilometres torus that lay hidden in the earth. His expensive train set where particles were collided at close to the speed of light and absolute zero, -273 degrees C. A replication of when the universe began, or so the theory dictated.

He dumped his mobile in exchange for an elastic band and ping’d it through the hot air of the LHCb. The b represented beauty, the type of protons that were generated in their billions by the collider. But it wasn’t very beautiful in his hole and the lure of a family weekend poisoned his latest analysis. Results that needed to be exact before sharing it with an exacting Bert. He had compared the background Higgs Boson count that morning with results from when they had discovered it. He needed the static level to calibrate the detector for the new project. The first result was nonsensical, so he had spent another six hours to check it again and to double-check his method; it was still grossly inflated.

He belched, his guts ached, and he thought again about Bert; successfully finding the glue that holds the universe together was never enough to satisfy Bert’s craving for knowledge. His overwhelming desire to understand Mankind’s start and also its potential end. Bert had a new theory, where there was less glue and fewer HBs. Sam had told his wife, Briony that it was like boiling rice in water, and Bert wanted to know what happened if there was less and less water. A theory that Sam had christened Back to Big Bang, a pun on the Back to the Future film, his implication being the theoretical impossibility of a stupid theory. He had told his wife this but never Bert. Sam thought it a waste of CERN time; the existence of a fifth world, a parallel universe created at the Big Bang, was of no value to society. But the HB discoverer was famous enough to have as much funding as he desired and that made Sam jealous as he struggled on with his old and now unfashionable research.

He sighed and stretched his leg muscles from a horizontal squat, threatened by the fifty computer eyes staring at him. There was a perfect silence in his small cage as the screens watched his every move. He could hear his heart palpitating as he contemplated the right action. On Monday, the team would recommence the next set of experiments. They would be colliding matter and antimatter hydrogen particles to create mini black holes. Logically, that gave him the rest of the weekend to collect new data on the background level of HB’s. He nodded to himself. He was glad no one else had seen the latest iteration; he didn’t want wild rumours circulating around the campus. Dragging his wild grey hair into a pony tail, he secured his locks using an elastic band that lay with countless others spewed across his desk. Ammunition that remained to be flicked at the inert beasts. Sam stabbed speed dial four on his mobile and waited.

The clipped but soft Mancunian accent answered without any preamble. ‘You never ring me, never; only emails.’

‘Bert, I think we have a problem.’ Sam rubbed his red eyes again. He thought about the cold beer sitting in the fridge at home, the laughter and fun of his two kids and the love of his wife. He decided the beer would come first to help lower his stress levels; a few beers, not one or two.

‘What?’

Sam accepted his friend was invariably rude, an introverted personality who lived life by his rules. That was his mate, Bert, the scientist who didn’t really care about much other than his particle universe and his garden. It went through Sam’s mind that Bert’s attention span followed the Pareto rule. Particles were 80% of his thoughts and his plants, wife and kids in that priority fitted into the 20% remaining. Lately Sam had noticed an imbalance; Bert was giving even less time to his wife, Natalia. At least according to Briony and she had recently told him the discord was worsening; like their breakdown before and that worried him.

Sam sighed. ‘This can’t be discussed on the phone, Bert; it’s between you and me.’ He gushed on. ‘Can we meet? Maybe a beer on your veranda later tonight?’

‘What can’t be said over the phone?’

‘Trust me, Bert.’

‘I always have, apart from on my stag night.’ Sam dropped his forehead into his hand and waited. ‘Tonight is a really bad night. The kids are due home from boarding school soon, Natalia is demanding my time for a special supper, family time blah.’

Sam jerked his head upwards, clipping his words, ‘I said, trust me Bert.’

‘She keeps reminding me that I’m on holiday and all that stuff.’

‘You jammy bastard, you are so damned possessive about your time. What about mine, it’s six in the evening and I need a kip.’ Bert didn’t bother responding. Sam could hear the wall clock ticking away. Of course, he wanted to be with his own family but this discovery could be monumental. ‘OK, I have a better idea. We can chat at the christening tomorrow? It gives me time to do more tests, job done.’

‘No worries but you know I hate holidays so if you want, I could drive over to CERN in an hour or two?’

‘Yeah, it would be more interesting for you than your family, wouldn’t it.’ He heard Bert grunt. ‘Look, you mustn’t upset Natalia.’

‘KK.’

‘And it allows me time to think about the third set of results due in about two hours.’ He paused, still tempted to meet up. ‘So I’ll sleep on it thanks.’

Bert laughed. ‘I can’t wait to hear your big secret. Are you aiming for a Nobel exposé? The Higgs Boson doesn’t really exist, it was a glitch in the data?’

Sam was too tired to listen to Bert’s flippancy, ‘if only it was that simple.’

Bert interrupted him, ‘Tell me the problem then, come on pal, nothing can be that serious.’

‘Look, it is about the Higgs Boson; I’m seeing high background levels and that is impossible because if true, it would affect how our universe is stuck together, yeah.’

‘I guess you’re checking out the reasons why, Sam?’

‘Yes, but,’ he was talking to his boss, he decided to defer the conversation. ‘Listen, Bert, I’ll check everything again and see you tomorrow at the christening.’

‘Sam, remember, nothing can be that important. Just go home to Briony and the kids and leave it until Monday; we can talk then.’

‘You’re all heart. Listen, sit at the back of the church and alone, because I think we should keep this confidential, yeah?’

‘I got that first time round. You really think the results are correct?’

‘Could be.’ Sam touched the iPhone8 to cut the conversation and looked up to the third tier of data screens. They glowed to life as he reset the test algorithms on the HB detector before heading towards the vending machines for an umpteenth coffee. A third extrapolation would certainly focus Bert’s mind, unless of course it was all an aberration? He sighed again. ‘I hope to God it is.’ He quickly crossed himself whilst murmuring the Holy Trinity. Pressing speed dial one he began apologising to his wife for his continued absence with a deep Christian sincerity.

* * *

She gazed upon the Swiss Riviera with disdain. She mocked its inhabitants and the endless visitors and had done so since its conception in the The Belle Epoque. She saw the mortals were fools, it was not their perceived paradise, a heaven on earth protected by their imagined Gods, it was Her’s. The warmth of the early evening was sliding down the hill to the lake and a damp chill spread from the mountains above to rest on the grass and the mere mortal. Bert lay on his back in his garden high above the town of Montreux and dreamed of his Universal Model until nature disturbed him.

The plant spoke gently and persuasively. ‘I have something to tell you, Bert. Sleep on if you want, but listen to me in your dreaming.’

Bert’s head lolled to the left side. His eyes remained shut but his being listened to Lily. She raised her peltate leaves to amplify her message, they caressed the sun as she absorbed the last ultraviolet fleeing the Alps.

‘I know you can hear me, Bert. You mustn’t deny it. Wake now and realise my truth.’

He was in a shallow dream. His balding head was red, braised by the rays which flooded into late May. She knew he could see Her, a pure white lily through his closed eyes, a bright retinal image of floral beauty. Fifty perfect petals of translucent angel wings reaching towards heaven, clasping gold fingers of flaming stamen, brighter than the sun. She smiled at him, her face an impossibly divine countenance for a flower. Lily whispered into the zephyr of a breeze that made her tremble, in trepidation of a new era dawning. She sang her oldest cantata of nature. Her voice pushed black striations across the silvered water and the reverberations gently penetrated his inner ear and attacked his mind.

Lily foretold the future. Factually and scientifically, as a scientist would like to hear it. He lay inert, the olive green fronds of crenellated leaves shaded his bare feet that teetered on the bank of the etang.

‘We need your help to save us, Bert. Logical and remorseless, replaceable by none. We lilies were the first eukaryote, exceptional in the creation. Now we will bloom one last summer but so will the inadequates, leaving our spores to conserve us as the last species on earth. The last to suffer death and annihilation.’

Bert grunted. She saw his eyelids were still closed, so she pitched her voice to the depths of the etang.

‘We need your help.’

She wanted him to oust his work from his mind for a brief moment to listen to Her. To avoid hiding within his subconscious, between interactions and quantum particle solutions. She breathed on him making him squirm on the harsh prairie grass. A cloud of pollen rose and drifted above his bare toes, exploding from the brown spires of the dock leaves under his heel. A seed of grass released a pre-emptive burst of pollen, but selfishly retained the majority of its four million grains. She looked around the lake and its guardian peaks towering above, whilst the minority human slept on, the majority, earth’s nature, infiltrated his clothes on the warm spring day. But now she requested access to his mind, she flowed into him.

‘Humankind has one season to secrete themselves below the soil and shelter like our spores. Your intelligence can help you before our finality but not after our demise as we end as one. Come and hide in the depths with us. Be a part of nature for the second time since the beginning. Only you, Bert, will understand Man’s ending and tell the truth to the world. This is our will and your destiny.’

She touched his sole, a gentle caress from her stamen and she momentarily moved him. Bert shuddered and woke, his heart trembled and his eyes gazed about wildly, searching the natural pool.

* * *

‘Bert, Bert, where are you?’ his wife Natalia called from the shade of the balcony. Her voice carried into the light and rested heavily on the garden, Muscovite and strident. One of the ruling classes demanding attention. Lily listened and watched carefully, the being’s wife was important to Her plan. ‘Are you going for Allie and Josh at the railway… да? I want a bath and you have disappeared. Bert!’ He got the gist of her Russian expression after the clang of the cow bell had died away, ‘love is cruel when I married a goat.’ Between the harsh phrases, her devotion to him poured across the red and purple heads of the wild flowers. Love swirled in a froth of colour wrestling with the nodding green spikes of the prairie and doubly touched the emotions of her disturbed husband. He shook his head then pushed himself upright, using his arms stretched straight behind him. Bert re-focussed on the vibrant etang. It was a secluded and ancient pond, nestling into a small cliff of limestone and fed by a hidden spring. A small compression for the lake perch to be imprisoned for the Victorian house guests. She watched him search for Her; had she made contact? He looked behind him through the avenue of marching beech trees, and the dishevelled Cedar of Lebanon planted by Gertrude Jekyll. It was difficult to tell. Bert turned to his left where the jagged snowy peaks of the Dents de Midi guarded the verdant entrance to the chequered flats of the Rhone valley. Finally he looked down and to the right, where the croissant shaped sheen of Lac Léman baked for thirty kilometres until it steamed into the blue haze above Evian. Only the rich and famous afforded to holiday in Montreux in the 1800’s; staying for the season, a few built chalets like his home. Now the Riviera teemed with the local French from across the lake and hoards of Japanese from across the oceans.

Bert turned his attention back to the pool. She had succeeded, he squatted to look more closely. On the right bank, the downwind side, was a group of lilies. Each was a perfect circle with an exact V cut, a missing slice of mischief. Three hues of leaves were layered together; an obvious and predominant green, an odd red and a dying yellow. They resembled an overlapping and lopsided pile of plates. The traffic light colours controlled the growth and decline of life, but in the ascendance, on the top of the pile, was Lily. A huge green frond of leaves, darker than the rest and twice the size. Slightly raised above them, she was an elevated being.

The elevated human shouted again, ‘Can you hear me, Bert?’

He turned towards the chalet and responded through cupped hands. ‘Yes, course, my dear’ but ‘you’re so lazy,’ was his breathless reply to Natalia as he struggled to his feet. He shouted again, louder and sharper to be sure he had been heard. He could see her on the strip of dark brown cedar clinging to the faded pink screed of the walls. ‘Of course I can Natalia.’ He stretched to the sky, his shoulder muscles creaking as the hands swung at speed to his sides. Bending quickly, he slipped his right foot into his sandal and used his forefinger to prise the heel into the warmth of the chamois. As he reached for the opposite sandal, he looked ‘Her’ straight in the face. Gently he leaned forward, seduced by her beauty, but aware of falling as his heart beat faster. There were no petals, merely a lament in the odourless kiss. As he thrust his foot into the leather of his left sandal, he accidentally folded the heel double. ‘Talking to plants, what an illogical idea.’ He stamped twice to denounce Her, whilst stumbling away. Then he turned his back on Lily, certain in his waking consciousness that a plant couldn’t talk, and marched to the house to find the keys to his Mercedes.

Lily commanded the kingdom plantae to watch him closely, to absorb knowledge from this being. They could feel him pass, now She had touched him; their atoms moved, disturbed by his charge and they told Her what he was, his particles, his charges. The selective, She called him. Selected by Her. She viewed him as consistently human and weak; the wayside plants and trees confirmed what she had thought. His strong back disappeared into the shade of the kitchen door and they lost his animation. As one they silently sighed. No humans heard, only Lily; the humans hadn’t listened for millennia, but the chuffs heard. The black birds spun away into the sky with raucous cries and circled the gigantic cedar in disgust. Their caws were loud enough to drown the still chattering flowers and the calm conversation of the pines.

* * *

Bert smiled as he approached the yellow Mercedes GT AMG. He patted his hand across the wide rump of the car; his smile widened. He had bought the car as a reflection of his personality. He loved the mirrored glass in which he could see his blue drainpipe jeans and flapping white shirt, ostentatiously styled with a shell pattern. The shirt had been a present from his wife and he always wore it outside of his trousers to hide his plump tummy. Despite his balding pate, he felt he looked younger than his 46 years. His lack of exercise and his computer-dominated worship of physics had barely affected his appearance since his twenties. He had spent his cash to stay dashing and exciting, ever a student at heart.

Bert settled into the black leather cockpit and pumped the starter button. The primal scream from five hundred horsepower of the V8 engine gave him a shot of adrenaline as he accelerated out of the chalet’s drive. Roaring through the narrow lanes he headed for the funicular railway station. Although totally analytical, he could never resist challenging the numerous Swiss speed limits; but always with a measured illegality, biased by the probability of a police trap.

His daughter Allie stood with her arms crossed as she leaned against the glass shelter of Glion station. She was tapping her left fingers in rhythm against the glass and staring straight at him as he pulled up with a tiny skid on a trace of gravel. He smiled back invisibly, Bert always smiled at her, a younger image of her mother. They both had long platinum blonde hair, a wide mouth and the rarest of eye colours, a verdant green. But Allie was fashionably slim, unlike her mother, who had become fashionably rounded, like a glamorous actress between films. On Allie’s right was her twin brother. 15 years old, tie knot residing at chest level, with muddied trousers. Josh sat collapsed on top of his Nike duffel bag that had been carelessly thrown onto the gravel. He didn’t hear his father arrive because the red headphones enclosed the Metallica music which reverberated around his skull and thrust everything else onto the conceptual horizon. Allie turned slightly and kicked him hard on the thigh. With a glance at the arrival and a nod of his brown tousled hair he bounced to his feet. Allie jerked open the Merc door and forcibly pushed her brother into the tiny back seat before lowering the front one and sliding gracefully into the bucket.

‘Daddy, why won’t you come to our college and collect us on a weekend? Other daddies come.’ She crossed her arms, pouted her bottom lip and waited for an answer. Bert realised she thought more like her mother every week but he was still smiling. He loved all his family deeply, foibles and all.

‘Hello children, how are you? OK daddy, how are you? Have you had a nice few days at home daddy?’ His son kept his head lowered in the rear seat and heard none of the gentle sarcasm. His daughter shrugged her shoulders, waiting for an answer. ‘Firstly, it is to teach you non-dependency, my princess, and secondly…it’s a nightmare journey when half of Lausanne and Geneva are heading into the mountains for the weekend.’

She remonstrated as he pulled away. ‘But, I am non-dependent. You and mummy constantly restrict my freedom. That isn’t my problem, it’s yours!’

‘No, no, no, lovely. Our restrictions are because you are very expensive to maintain. Besides which, the other daddies are mostly bodyguards and we are a normal family despite your mummy’s oil riches. True?’

‘Uhh, not true at all.’

‘Which bit, lovely?’

She clutched her steamer tighter into her stomach as he hit 100 kph through the 30 limit of the village. ‘You restrict my freedom and my money but you sent me to the most expensive school in the world where I have to maintain my parity.’ Bert considered her last word, wondering how much parity might cost him. He had always thought his kids should have been sent to the local gymnase; but Natalia had over-ruled him.

Josh, who had now dispensed with one earpiece of his Bose, had released some thinking time away from the bang bang of his pleasure.

‘Parity of elementary particles, coordinates with the charge. That is, plus or minus and of course with Time it helps identify and locate a particle.’

Allie slapped the vanity mirror down to stare at her brother. ‘Read status instead of parity then and stop talking scientific rubbish like daddy always does.’ She crossed her arms and resumed her pout.

He continued unabashed. ‘Parity means a flip in the coordinates of a particle lying in a 3-dimensional space, like seeing something in a mirror. In one way your statement is therefore correct i.e. you need to define your location against or above your friends. In another way, you are just trying to impress the sons of Sheiks and Presidents.’ She turned quickly and slammed her fist onto his boney leg.

‘You doik,’ was said to his pale spotty face.

‘C’mon…sis. Didn’t even hurt yeah.’

She turned back to the forward and present danger and clasped her bag tighter as they skipped over the crest of a narrow bridge. She squirmed deeper into the bucket seat and closed her eyes. Bert decided, he had better release the sibling tension, although he knew they were too old to take note anymore. ‘Josh, one, can you stop saying c’mon…all the time as it actually makes you sound like a doik. And especially don’t use it in front of your mother.’ He heard a low grunt from behind. ‘Two. You should be yourself princess, forget peer pressure and be like me.’ She flicked her hair off her left eye, he caught the movement as he glanced across and he knew it meant really. ‘Three. Your brother explained parity correctly. That means the school is worth every Swiss franc we pay for it.’ He braked hard, thrusting them forward into their seat belts.

Her reply was unwavering. ‘No, daddy, you didn’t come to the college because you are busy working, even when you are supposedly on holiday.’ He knew she was right, ‘Mummy always comes at weekends.’

Bert gave in. ‘That may be true, lovely.’ He always gave in, at least when he was around; as he had always given into his beautiful wife. He had met Natalia at the Nobel banquet in the Blue Hall of Stockholm in 1996. She fell in love with him over the lobster. He with her, over the Ballotine de Pintade and their future was sealed over a digestif of Calvados when they arranged to meet in her room at the Hotel Skeppsholmen. Their future lifestyle was also determined that evening mirroring the luxury of the hotel and the delicacy of the rich gastronomy. Bert learned later that Natalia’s father, Victor Suvarov, the Russian oil oligarch, had taken a whole wing at the hotel. At the time, Bert had felt privileged to be one of the thirteen hundred Nobel guests and in awe of the riches cocooning her.

Allie spoke nervously as she swayed left and then right. ‘Just explain to me,’ she swallowed, ‘what is more important than your princess?’

Bert glanced in the mirror at his boy. ‘An explanation please, son. I need to concentrate on.’ The tyres screeched as they raced around a hairpin.

Josh was staring down at a Beat Hazard on his mobile, whilst listening to AC/DC. His answer was therefore an entertainment sideshow. The ability to think in many dimensions emanated from his dad’s genes. ‘Daddy is of course a Physics Nobel Laureate. He continues his quest for a parallel universe, even when on holiday.’ Josh talked without taking a breath and at speed. Bert liked the fact that his son was a chip off the old block; it made him feel very proud. ‘Particles of matter and antimatter were collided based on 20 years of mathematical postulations that other universes can be accessed if you try hard enough.’ His sister grimaced with boredom as she leaned forward to look for their house. ‘By smashing up quarks, one can achieve nothing less than alchemy; transforming one element into another or creating particles unknown to mere mortals…especially thick sisters.’

Allie had given up hitting Josh. But she turned and asked him a genuine question. ‘Yes, but what does daddy actually do?’

Josh pulled his headphones straight over both ears as he looked down and spoke to his mobile. ‘I dunno.’

Bert heaved a sigh at his daughter’s ignorance. ‘My princess, my team explore matter, energy, space and time. We collide particles head on, that gives us the best information on what makes us, us. Basically, we detect the fleeting detritus as it sprays out from forty million collisions per second. Got it?’

She sulked. ‘Of course not, but you never make it simple enough, do you?’

‘Yes I do, but